Hired and forgotten after his recruiter left, an employee has been collecting a paycheck for seven months, without ever working.

It sounds like a scene from a comedy series, but the story is very real. An American employee was hired by one of the world’s largest property companies… only to be literally forgotten. For the past seven months, he has been earning a salary approaching six figures while remaining inactive.

A contract signed, a manager sacked, and then… the void

It all begins when an employee, living on the east coast of the United States, lands an administrative position with a major international property company. Just before his first day, the manager who had recruited him was sacked. As a result, no one gave him any assignments or made him part of a team.

When he arrived for his first day, an employee from another department simply showed him to his office. Since then, he has sat alone in an empty space behind his former manager’s desk. For several weeks, he tried to report the situation to other managers, but to no avail. None of his superiors seemed concerned by his plight.

Work (barely), cash in, start again

Despite this organisational void, the employee says he continues to clock in and out regularly: he goes into the office three days a week to check in, and teleworks the other two. His only tasks? He creates salary calculation sheets, which he sends to his superior every week, without ever receiving any feedback. This takes him just 15 minutes a week.

The rest of the time, he reads, watches videos… or does nothing. He admits that he is not looking for a second teleworking job to fill his days. “I’m a confirmed slacker. I don’t even feel like doing this job, so a second one? Definitely not,” he explains on Reddit.

An isolated case… or symptomatic?

This testimony, which has gone viral, reveals a flagrant organisational dysfunction. Yet such cases are not uncommon. Companies such as Meta have already been accused of recruiting engineers during the pandemic… without ever giving them the slightest assignment, just to **prevent them from joining the competition**.

In Spain too, internal audits have sometimes revealed similar situations: employees officially in post, present in HR files, but totally inactive due to a lack of hierarchical follow-up.

The case of this employee raises questions: how can a company ignore the existence of an employee for several months? It raises questions not only about human resources management, but also about the logic of certain mass recruitments in large organisations, where a cog can disappear without the machine even noticing.

While waiting to be ‘discovered’, our ghost employee savours his strange good fortune. Paid on the nose, with no constraints or responsibilities, he has become the unlikely symbol of a capitalism that sometimes forgets itself.